It is well indeed that the opponents should meet on the lip or edge of the river. The lips are the boundaries of the mouth and a kind of hedge to the tongue and through them the stream of speech passes, when it begins its downward flow. Now speech is an ally employed by those who hate virtue and love the passions to inculcate their untenable tenets, and also by men of worth for the destruction of such doctrines and to set up beyond resistance the sovereignty of those that are better, those in whose goodness there is no deceit. When, indeed, after they have let out every reef of contentious sophistry, the opposing onset of the sage’s speech has overturned their bark and sent them to perdition, he will, as is just and fit, set in order his holy choir to sing the anthem of victory, and sweet is the melody of that song. For Israel, it says, saw the Egyptians dead on the edge of the sea (Ex. 14:30)—not elsewhere. And when he says “dead” he does not mean the death which is the separation of soul and body, but the destruction of unholy doctrines and of the words which their mouth and tongue and the other vocal organs gave them to use. Now the death of words is silence, not the silence which well-behaved people cultivate, regarding it as a sign of modesty, for that silence is actually a power, sister to the power of speech, husbanding the fitting words till the moment for utterance comes. No, it is the undesired silence to which those whom the strength of their opponent has reduced to exhaustion and prostration must submit, when they find no longer any argument ready to their hand. For what they handle dissolves in their hands, and what they stand on gives way beneath them, so that they must needs fall before they stand. You might compare the treadmill which is used for drawing water. In the middle are some steps and on these the labourer, when he wants to water the fields, sets his feet but cannot help slipping off, and to save himself from continually falling he grasps with his hands some firm object nearby and holding tight to it uses it as a suspender for his whole body. And so his feet serve him for hands and his hands for feet, for he keeps himself standing with the hands which we use for work, and works with his feet, on which he would naturally stand.
On the Confusion of Tongues 10
Tap any verse to see what it echoes — and start a chain or echo from it.